Chapter 1

My words froze the room for a solid three seconds.

My cousin's girlfriend, Jodie Collins, dropped her cutlery onto the table, and the color instantly drained from her innocent face.

I sneered inwardly. She was scared already?

Before I could even pull out my badge, my spineless cousin, Leroy Huff, flipped.

He slammed his cutlery back down, pointing a finger dead at my face as he yelled, "Isabelle Huff! Are you out of your mind? You're making up lies this big to save your pride? If you're in the vice squad, then I'm the king!"

My aunt, Andrea Huff, snapped out of her daze next. She chimed in with her usual passive-aggressive malice, "I've always said that Isabelle has loved lying ever since she was a kid.

"She gets caught doing something shameful by Jodie, and now she's pretending to be a cop? That's a federal crime, you know. Daniel, aren't you going to rein in your daughter?"

My father, Daniel Huff, flushed red with rage. He was about to slam the table when my uncle, Jacob Huff, held him back.

By then, Jodie had collected herself.

I had to hand it to her. The woman's nerves were made of steel. She deserved an award for her acting skills.

Her eyes welled up instantly, tears trembling perfectly on the edge of falling.

Feigning weakness, she collapsed into Leroy's arms and trembled like a leaf.

"Leroy… maybe I got the wrong person. B-But that photo on the 200-dollar rate sheet looked exactly like Isabelle…"

Sobbing softly, she fumbled through her purse and pulled out her phone. "Let me find it for everyone. Maybe I really was just seeing things."

She opened her gallery and thrust the screen right in front of the relatives' faces.

It was a blurry profile shot.

The woman in the photo was wearing next to nothing in a piece of skimpy lingerie, posing provocatively.

Other than the hairstyle being somewhat like mine, the face looked totally photoshopped.

But did anyone at this table actually care about the truth?

Of course not. They just wanted gossip and a chance to drag my family through the mud.

As the phone made its rounds, the living room erupted.

"Goodness! You really can't judge a book by its cover!"

"She acts so proper and dresses so modestly, but turns out this is how she makes her money?"

"200 bucks? That's so cheap. Just how desperate is she?"

"The ancestors must be rolling in their graves. To think our family raised such a degenerate!"

Scornful, disgusted glares locked onto me from every direction.

"Really? But it's obvious this picture has been photoshopped," I said.

I pointed at the image, zooming in with my fingers. "The edges around the hair are heavily pixelated and jagged, typical of a bad edit. But more importantly, take a look at her hand at the back. She has six fingers."

Having handled my fair share of image-tampering fraud cases, I knew exactly what to look for.

Jodie clearly hadn't anticipated that.

Her face turned pale before she quickly pivoted back to her victim act. "Isabelle, if you say it's not you, then fine. Just don't look at me like that. You're scaring me…"

With that, she buried her face in Leroy's chest.

Leroy pointed at my nose and yelled again, "You did the deed and now you're trying to muzzle people? If you're so innocent, prove it!"